Finally, on my way to learning Rails!

The problem was permissions on the MySQL database when following along on pg. 55 of Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide. It’s the first exercise of hooking up a database to Rails.

As part of building the MySQL table, the exercise has you execute the following line:

depot> mysql depot_development

Up to this point in the exercise, connecting to the database was done with the username “root” and no password. Everything worked fine. But executing the above line caused the following error.

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'ODBC'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

Can’t finish creating the database.  Rats!

The Solution

Long story short, the solution was found in the MySQL Error Log.  In it, I kept on seeing citations that had “port:3306″ in it.

Instead of trying to connect and build the database from the command line, like it’s illustrated in the book, I decided to use MySQL-Front to connect to the database.   But I still could not.
Now, the server that ships with Rails, WEBrick, apparently is on port 3000.  I tried that port in MySQL-Front.  No luck.

So, I tried using port 3306.  It connected just fine!

Now, I haven’t actually tried to manipulate the table in MySQL-front, or Rails, just yet because I’ve run out of timing trying to solve this problem, but I think I solved the problem.